Russ Shafer-Landau

Russ Shafer-Landau is an American philosopher specializing in metaethics, ethics, and the philosophy of law. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1992 and taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He founded and continues to edit the annual series Oxford Studies in Metaethics and convenes the Madison Metaethics Workshop (MadMeta), which has become a central venue for the field. Shafer-Landau is best known for defending non-naturalist moral realism, the view that moral facts are objective, mind-independent, and not reducible to natural properties. His Moral Realism: A Defence (2003) argues for the cognitive, robustly objective status of moral judgments and engages major challenges from expressivism, error theory, and naturalist reductionism. His textbooks The Fundamentals of Ethics and The Ethical Life have shaped undergraduate ethics teaching. Although his work is not principally about the existence of God, it bears on philosophy of religion through the metaethical premises of moral arguments for theism: by defending objective moral facts without appeal to God, Shafer-Landau provides a secular grounding for moral realism that theist philosophers such as Robert Adams and William Lane Craig contest, while debating critics such as Sharon Street and Richard Joyce on evolutionary debunking.